Author of the Alchemancer and Assassin Without a Name fantasy series

Rumors of my death are false. I'm still alive and kicking and trying to squeeze in some writing whenever and however I can. I'm relying more and more on Office Live Workspace for those days when I don't have my laptop with me. It's working out pretty well; I'd like to do another blog post on the topic as a follow-up. Stay tuned for that.

Now, however, I've slowed the blogging, including doing weekly writing updates because I've been finding it harder and harder of late to make any significant progress. I hate to just post that I didn't make any progress week in and week out—of course, here I am doing just that.

On writing… I did take a couple of weeks off. I needed the time to step away from my current project (the one I'd been posting weekly about). I like the characters. I like the story. But still, it was missing something. To that end, I've started over on the editing. Page 1. With a mind towards adding another layer to the story and, in particular, to one character. The end result is that I hopefully end up with a better story. Whether I accomplish that or not… we'll have to see.

So, it's back to writing for me. Blogging will likely be kept to a minimum while I concentrate on wrapping up this novel. But I'll be around and back on the blogging thing in time.

Alright, so I made absolutely no progress this past week. Actually, that's not true. I advanced my edit page by 1 to 307 out of 367. It's a bit frustrating, especially given that I'm so close to finishing this edit, and, to tell you the truth, I'm not even sure how the week got away from me. One thing came up, and another, and another, and so on, and I just never quite sat down to get any writing done.

OK, even that's not entirely true. I hit upon a climatic part of the story and I did spend some time thinking it out, mostly because I'm not so sure I nailed it as it stands right now, but the silver bullet never came to me. It's going to take some more thought, and hopefully I'll get it sooner rather than later.

Also, I have to admit my mind has been wandering a bit to my next project. In many ways I have to wonder if my current novel is really breaking any new ground (enter yea old foe of the writer, Doubt). I think my next will, so it's hard to not think ahead to it. Plus it's just going to be a little… different. Still fantasy, but it all takes place in one city, and is going to be a bit of a mystery/thriller. At least that's the plan.

For now, though, I've got a conundrum to figure out so I can wrap up The Five Elements.

Decent writing progress to report. I hit page 272 out of 368, which is a net gain of 14 pages over last week. I added 2 additional pages of new material—really 3—but with some other edits the end result was that the novel's length went from 366 total pages to 368.

Weeks left: 5.4. That's awesome. That means in just over a month I should be finished with this edit. The operative word is should. We'll see how it goes.

Here's some graphical progress:

Total word count remained steady:

Percentage completion is now at 74%:

That's it for this time. Hope I have some more good progress to report next week.

Very good progress this past week. Overall, I'm up 36 pages, from last time's 220 to 256. I added 1 additional page, bringing the current total page count to 366.

The graph:

You can see that the total page count dipped and leveled off, but has now been steadily (and slowly) rising. Total word count actually went down by 37 this past week to 106,845:

I expect there to be maybe one more bump in word count—there's a new scene I feel I need to add to give the reader some more context on one of the main characters, plus it will allow me to utilize my witch character again (I love witches). Then, a gradual lessening as I continue to pare down sentences of unneeded words and such.

Percentage-wise, I hit 70% completion:

Couple of other stats I've been keeping: "average pages edited per week" and "weeks remaining". The first of those is at 18.13 pages/week. The second, 6.07 weeks remaining. 6 more weeks and I should be done with this pass. Things are really fitting together nicely. I'm looking forward to the next edit, which I've no doubt will go a lot faster once all the pieces are in place at the completion of this edit.

So-so progress this past week. I'm now on page 220 of 365. That's up from last week's 213 and 359, respectively. That leaves me with 145 pages to go. I only cranked out 1,636 words for the week, so from that perspective I didn't do so good. But, I did complete a scene that I had left a "to do" behind on during the first edit, and I'm mostly pleased with the way it turned out.

Total word count went from 105,246 to 106,882, which means I've been creeping back towards that magical 110,000 number. Here's the chart:

Percentage complete has kind of flattened out of late:

I figure about 8.6 weeks left at my current pace, which I think is up a bit from last week. However, now that I'm back into editing instead of writing new material I should be able to get that number moving down again.

Stay Connected

Find out about new releases first. Sign-up to receive an email notification when a new story of mine arrives on store shelves. As a special thank you, I'll send you the Tales of Uhl to read absolutely free.